Anatomy of a Composition - Rabbit Ears Winter Night

While the night sky has been a bit allusive so far in 2021, that doesn’t mean that it is any less on my mind. Weather delays, work obligations, COVID concerns all seem to add up, making either less than ideal conditions, or simply poorly considered options. Heading out a second Saturday of  shooting in Steamboat, I planned ahead enough to make up three different potential locations for a night sky composition. 

Ute Pass, which offers an incredible overlook of the Gore Range was my first attempt.  This road has mostly a north to south orientation, and I quickly realized that while Orion was visible, I was too late in the night to get a proper setting time-lapse of the constellation behind the mountains.  I did create a quick stack of images and overall am happy with the final images it produced, though I need to work a bit more on it to clean the nebulosity in the image. 

My second stop, and a shot I have been thinking about for a while was to shoot over the Rabbit Ears, the rock formation that Rabbit Ears Pass is named for. The challenge here is that in winter the best place to shoot isn’t accessible, the forest road is covered in snow. So, I parked along the highway in a spot kept free of snow by the highway department and set the camera up.  Like the Ute Pass location, I quickly realized that the North Star was not in my frame, making the circular image I was envisioning impossible.  But with the rock formation in the frame, it seemed that a time-lapse of the starry sky passing behind the rocks would create a beautiful scene. What I didn’t account for was the amount of traffic that still passes at this time of night. While I was set 20 feet up on a snowbank, the lights of the passing vehicles created a flare in the lens that rendered a number of the images unusable. And given the frequency of traffic, this was a much larger portion of images than I’d anticipated. I will try to re-edit this set again, but for now the settings that I used and the headlights combined to teach me an important lesson.  

Fortunately, while I didn’t realize how poorly the images would come out, I did look for one more composition, as there was still time in the night sky to shoot one more sequence. Driving west up onto the Pass, I stopped to scout different shots.  Getting to the western side of the Pass I found this composition - a large snow field, surrounded by pine trees, with the top of a high ridge off in the distance, but best of all, the North Star was clearly visible high in the sky above the whole setting. The challenge was that this spot is right along the road, with no real shoulder to safely park in. This would mean parking a distance away, and then standing next to the camera while it recorded the scene, 500 frames in total, or leaving the camera setting by itself on a cold winter night, along the highway, a lone witness to the traversing night sky. With pretty significant trepidation, I chose the latter option.  I was able to use better settings on the camera, traffic offered a grateful respite, and I even found time to catch up on a little sleep.  

When I returned to the camera just a little over an hour later, I found it covered in a bit of frost, but still firing away. The moon has risen in the eastern sky, lighting up the snow covered meadow below.  I gathered up my gear, and found another hour of sleep, and set up in town along the Yampa River for another sunrise sequence. Knowing the potential of this location, I hope to return this summer to see what a warmer night sky offers. For now, I’m very happy with the results, and can only look for more opportunities like this soon. The time lapse of this sequence is posted in the Moon & Stars Gallery for you to enjoy.  

March, 2021 - As always, thank you for joining me on this adventure.

For more thoughts on some of these images, head over to www.wordpress.com/alma175w  

Anatomy of a Composition - Revisits ISO 800 |  f/1.8  | 8 sec. - 500 images - Sony a7iii - FE20/1.8G